Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.

As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.

Warning: This strategy won't work in all organizations. In some cases, management doesn't want to know the truth. However, in most organizations I've worked with, management wants to improve, but doesn't know how to fix the system.

The crushing business pressure is caused by a broken feedback loop that's baked into the organization's design. In this presentation, I'll show you how to fix the broken feedback loop. Learn how to:

Gather evidence of developer productivity loss
Identify the key organizational changes required for success
Make the case to management for improvement
Partner with your manager for long-term success
If the system is broken, we need to fix the system. You can change the system by making the decision to lead.

Note: This talk is not strictly dependent on attending, “Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail”, but you'll get way more out of the session, if you attend both.